Examining Transcultural Spiritual Literacies Among Latino Children Through Artifactual Mediations

Abstract

Although the notion of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) has been well studied and affirmed as important in recognizing the strengths of children and developing inclusive pedagogical models (Albright & Luke, 2008), this article presents a study of transcultural spiritual literacy—an element of cultural capital that is often overlooked, seldom studied in an organized fashion (Smith & Osborn, 2007, p. 23), and rarely validated in pedagogical inquiry as a vital indicator of children’s meaning-making. However, this important form of cultural capital threads through the lives of children who participated in this study, which provided a “multi-modal ethnographic gaze” (Rowsell, 2011, p. 335) of spiritual literacies of 14 children from first-generation immigrant Latino families at a U.S. church-affiliated community center. This article, which discusses part of that study, will focus on the artifactual mediations of one of those children: Paulina. Spirituality, although not synonymous with religion in our study, overlaps with religion in both space and ideology, and surround issues including identity, transcultural navigations, and sociocritical perspectives and understandings.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stacy Lee Peñalva

Stacy Lee Peñalva is currently a doctoral candidate in Literacy, Culture, and Language at Indiana University and is also the director of Centro Familiar Vida Nueva. Her research examines transcultural, translingual, and translocal navigations of immigrant children and their families, exploring the threads of spirituality, agency, and power wound around these navigations.

Linda Skidmore Coggin

Linda Skidmore Coggin is a doctoral candidate in Literacy, Culture, and Language Education at Indiana University. Her research interests include new literacies and pedagogical perspectives and practices that honor individuals’ stories and interests.

Carmen L. Medina

Carmen Liliana Medina is an associate professor in Literacy, Culture, and Language Education at Indiana University. She is coauthor of the book Literacy, Play and Globalization: Converging Imaginaries in Children’s Critical and Cultural Performances with K. Wohlwend (Routledge, 2014). Her research focuses on literacy and biliteracy as social and critical practices.